


Company

by notquitejiraiya (lethargicshadowlover)



Category: Naruto
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - War, F/M, Forbidden Love, Language Barrier, Opposites Attract, like a war war, old fashioned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23681947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethargicshadowlover/pseuds/notquitejiraiya
Summary: Forced to run from the terror of the battlefield, Shikamaru finds himself in the undergrowth; cold, hurting, alone. That is until a strange and terrifying woman sees his struggle from the outside, and she can't help but get involved.
Relationships: Gaara & Kankurou & Temari, Nara Shikamaru/Temari
Comments: 21
Kudos: 37





	Company

It felt like he hadn’t moved in days, but he had, even if only a few feet.

When he’d had to resort to running—or rather crawling—into the undergrowth and amongst the trees, he hadn’t reached for ammunition. It was painful enough forcing his body through the rain, the mud, the brambles, with an empty rifle on his back and further away from his remaining comrades. To be brutal he hadn’t even expected to make it the two-hundred feet he’d scurried.

But playing dead worked—his peers were right—and it had given him enough discretion to escape the eyes of the enemy more than once these last few days. Yet now, as he propped himself up against the prickly bark of an oak and let his eyes fall to the weeping patches on his leg, he couldn’t help but wish he wasn’t playing anymore.

War was bad enough in company, but alone it was impossible.

Shikamaru winced as he reached down, pulling off the nauseating lumps of cloth that decorated his leg, hiding each of the three bullet holes. He wasn’t stupid; he knew there was only so much he could rip up his undershirt and fashion it into bandages; he knew that out here there was no way he could avoid infection, or remove these bastards that littered him. There was no chance. Unless he found a sharp rock…

No, he was far too squeamish for such things. He’d almost vomited the day he got here—the day he’d watched his captain shoot an intruder to the trench without blinking. To dig around his muscle with a rock wouldn’t be nearly as harrowing, but the pain would be unimaginable. Being shot had been bad enough. He wanted nothing less than to relive that impossible pain all over again.

By the time he’d torn three more patches of cloth and stuck them to their corresponding holes, the sun was peeping through the trees.

Nothing was necessarily good about being where he was, but those trees were undoubtedly the best part. The way the leaves danced in the wind, and each drop of warm colour falling carelessly as they did. An orange blanket, dusted with reds and yellows beneath him hardly made up for his discomfort, but it gave Shikamaru a chance to imagine what things would be like without the inconvenience of being so terribly injured, without being here.

Back home he had never liked the outside. He was the sort of child who did better away from the elements, where he could think without interruption or nature’s whispers and echoes. But he’d always watched from his window as the trees down his street grew yellow to red to bare in autumn and winter, and often stepped out just to hear the crunch beneath his boots.

There was no crunch now, just a soft rustle amongst the wet undergrowth. And no window to be safe behind as the rain poured down.

“Man up,” he whispered to himself as he winced, adjusting his position against the tree-trunk. He ran a frozen hand across his forehead, catching the slightest bit of hair and jumped.

He still wasn’t used to his short hair. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t him.

A whistle rang out through the trees, and Shikamaru instantly toppled over, hiding his warm breath against the leaves. He’d heard enough birdsong since he’d got here, and there was now doubt in his mind that wasn’t some harmless creature: that came from a human.

His rifle was empty of bullets. He was done for.

The sound of rustling grew ever closer, and with each passing second—each step he heard be placed—Shikamaru grew a little less afraid. Moments ago, he’d been wishing to be out of his misery. Why, on instinct, was his body still desperate to survive when he felt so indifferent? Maybe he’d be lucky, and they’d spot him moving—they’d shoot him somewhere fatal before he’d even saw their eyes.

The rustling stopped.

A subtle sob, a hitch in gentle breath, sounded behind him.

Shikamaru slowly lifted his head, eyes searching for the owner of the cry, and as he rested his chin on the mud, he met the gaze of two intense teal eyes. They belonged to a woman, as he had thought, tall and blonde. One hand covered her mouth, whilst the other held a basket of what looked like flowers from where he lay.

There was no way she was here to kill him, was there? She was a woman, after all.

Not that that really meant _anything_ —his mother was capable of it.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered, his voice croaking as he fumbled up onto his elbows. “Miss, can you help me?”

She stared at him blankly.

Shikamaru sighed, frowning. “Do you have a gun?”

His answer was harsh blinking.

“You don’t, um, speak English?”

No answer.

With as much strength as he could muster, Shikamaru hoisted himself back up to sit against the tree. He adjusted his leg and cleared his throat. “If you’re just quiet, and you _do_ understand me, just end it for me.”

A slight rustle came from her direction, and as he turned, she was leaning down beside him. Her fingertips ran across the holes in his leg over and over, poking and prodding the weeping wounds, and as he cried out her hand reached to cover his mouth.

“What the hell are you doing?” he mumbled through her hand. “That fucking kills!”

She placed her free hand across her mouth, and bright eyes narrowed into a dark, somewhat harrowing stare. Swiftly she hopped to her feet, motioning for him to follow.

Shikamaru laughed, shaking his head. “I can’t stand up.”

“Up.”

His lips curved up into a crude smile. “You do speak English?”

She said nothing, just deepened her frown.

“But you said—”

“Shh!” she hissed, looking around as she motioned for him to get up.

She muttered something in a language or dialect that Shikamaru couldn’t begin to understand, and he wondered if she was wishing him well or cursing him. He knew that back home, if a man in a uniform dissimilar to his was dying in a ditch somewhere, most of the people he knew had been told to leave them—to let them. It _had_ to have been cursing, but what else could he do but follow her instruction?

The orders of an intimidating stranger had to be better than certain death.

“I don’t think you understand, woman,” he groaned, heaving himself up an inch off the ground, before immediately dropping back to the floor. He winced, agonised by the fall. “I _can’t_ get up.”

She huffed, rolling up the sleeves of her blouse, and reached out her hand. “Up.”

Shikamaru shook his head. “You won’t hold my weight. Just leave me here.”

Her palms flew down and grabbed his forearm, gripping far too tightly and heaving him forward. It took a few attempts, but eventually Shikamaru found himself leaning forward, his weight resting—embarrassingly—on her chest as she held him up without much effort. It didn’t make sense, he thought, for her to be this strong. It was true that he wasn’t a heavy man and he hadn’t eaten in days, but a fully grown man as a deadweight could not have been easy. He knew—he’d hauled plenty of bodies from place to place in his time, dead or alive. Some much heavier than himself…

“Up.” When she said it this time it wasn’t an instruction. Alongside her thick accent, while he couldn’t quite see her face as he fumbled to stand on his better leg, was a tone of defiance. This woman had lifted him, whether he wanted her to or not, and now—for better or worse—he was indeed _up_.

As lifted his head, the stranger weaved his arm around her neck and attempted to hoist him a little onto her back. The attempt failed—she wasn’t _quite_ strong enough for this feat—but he did manage to get a better look at the face lingering so close to his.

Unlike his own, it was clean, impossibly clean. Shikamaru could barely remember the last time he saw anyone who’s face wasn’t riddled with dirt, and the clarity of it took him apart. Her eyes, while bright in colour, were glazed and gloomy and squinted at the ground as she tried desperately to lift him.

He wasn’t enjoying this. He wanted her to put him down; to just drop him, grab her flower basket or whatever it was, and go—get on with her life. But, when he went to speak again, and she huffed at him before a word could escape his lips, he knew better than to tell this woman what to do. Besides, whatever he said would fall on deaf ears—she really didn’t understand.

But this _was_ too much for her, he could see. It wasn’t without trying, she was lifting with all her might for whatever reason, but she wasn’t achieving anything.

“Look,” he mumbled, whining as he tried to take a tiny step with his better foot, “I just can’t walk, okay?”

She turned her head, those large eyes focusing in on his with such remorse, and Shikamaru immediately felt himself growing heavier. Her arms fought to keep him held up, but slowly had to give in as they shook, laying him down amongst the leaves again. Delicately, or whatever her skewed definition of such a thing was, she tried her hardest to place him where she’d found him, back against the bark.

When she fell back onto her knees, running a dirty hand through her beautiful blonde hair, er whole face looked changed, and her stare was terrorised beyond mere frustration. Immediately Shikamaru felt guilty that his pathetic little steps had been too weak—that his rag-doll body had been too heavy for her to carry him. This stranger _had_ wanted to help him, but because of his own inadequacies she was forced to leave him to die.

“Thank you,” he muttered, looking up as she rose from her knees further and further from him. “For trying.”

Her hands lifted her skirt slightly from her calves, and she tore off a section with a satisfying _rip_. Knees back in the mud, she wrapped the fabric tightly around the deepest wound on his leg, the one that sat just above his knee, before standing once more. As if she knew that it wasn’t enough, she shook her head and rubbed her eyes, brushing the hair across her forehead back and forth. Shikamaru forced a tired smile and nodded to her, as if to give the all clear for her to go, and she reached down for her basket with her eyes fixed on his.

She really _was_ leaving him to die. Of course that was sad, and his stomach wrenched at the thought of watching someone walk away from him like this, but he knew it was the only way.

“At least the last thing I see will be beautiful,” he chuckled, and gave her a meek thumbs up. But all she could do was frown, shrugging her shoulders.

Of course she didn’t understand, he had never expected her to. But as she muttered something sharply as she backed quickly away, disappearing into the undergrowth, he wished he could understand her. Selfishly he longed for the last words someone gave him to be those he could reply to. He didn’t want her to have apologised, or even to have said thank you for his grossly inappropriate compliment, but he would’ve done anything to talk—properly converse—with anyone.

He wasn’t to know, however, as he nestled down amongst his leaves and prickly sticks for another uncomfortable night, that the three words she’d used translated to the most hopeful and important words he’d hear:

_“I’ll be back.”_


End file.
